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The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s present-day invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West.
A century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this became the most ambitious espionage program in human history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “the illegals.” During the Cold War, illegals were dispatched to assassinate world leaders and steal technological secrets—the greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB’s most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB’s espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large.
A century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this became the most ambitious espionage program in human history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “the illegals.” During the Cold War, illegals were dispatched to assassinate world leaders and steal technological secrets—the greatest among them performed remarkable feats, while many others failed in their missions or cracked under the strain of living a double life.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, as well as archival research in more than a dozen countries, Shaun Walker brings this history to life in a page-turning tour de force that takes us into the heart of the KGB’s most secretive program. A riveting spy drama peopled with richly drawn characters, The Illegals also uncovers a hidden thread in the story of Russia itself. As Putin extols Soviet achievements and the KGB’s espionage prowess, and Moscow continues to infiltrate illegals across the globe, this timely narrative shines new light on the long arc of the Soviet experiment, its messy aftermath, and its influence on our world at large.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published April 17, 2025
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May 17, 2025
“A more honest appraisal of the past century would note that the history of the illegals offers a neat reflection of the story of Russia itself. The early program, with its soaring ambition, its obsession with subterfuge, and its disregard for the well-being of individuals, holds up a mirror to the fiery utopianism of the early Soviet Union. In the 1920s, using illegals was an ingenious way to gather intelligence for a country with little diplomatic presence abroad, and helped bolster the position of the young Soviet regime. But the obsession with subterfuge and conspiracy also contributed to the regime’s most destructive moment, the Great Terror of 1937, with Stalin convinced that enemy illegals had burrowed deep into Soviet Society. During the Cold War, illegals were often useful, but mainly because the Soviet Union was a closed state that did not allow its citizens to travel. Creating fake foreigners who could visit the West without raising suspicion was the only way for the KGB to access relatively basic information about its adversaries...”
- Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Tell me if you’ve heard this plotline before: Russian spies given the identities of dead Westerners and taught to speak flawless English are smuggled into the United States, where they raise families, run legitimate businesses, and conduct espionage activities on the side, all while awaiting activation as a sleeper cell should World War III ever break out.
If this sounds a lot like the television series The Americans, you’re absolutely right. Created by Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, The Americans – which ran for six seasons, and achieved very-good-to-near-great status – was loosely based on the real-life adventures of the Soviet Union’s “illegals” program. From week to week, the fictional Jennings family lived the middle-class dream – which included their two super-irritating kids – all while singlehandedly winning the Cold War.
Shaun Walker’s The Illegals tells the true story behind the program that inspired The Americans. Unfortunately, despite Walker’s best efforts, this is not nearly as entertaining as I expected it to be. In the end, while truth may often be stranger than fiction, it is not always as interesting.
***
Coverage-wise, The Illegals begins in the early 1900s, during the final decades of the Romanov’s imperial rule. It ends over a century later, with a newly-belligerent Russian Federation using a mutated form of “illegal” to bring about the downfall of America, one social media post at a time. This is a lot of ground to cover in roughly 350 pages, and while this has the virtue of a breakneck pace, it comes at the cost of depth.
As a matter of personal preference, I generally like more. More pages. More details. More context. I recognize, however, that this is not a universal view, and that some put greater emphasis on tautness, leanness, and taking the shortest line to the point. If I had to fit this into my own classification system, I’d say this is more of a “commuter train” or “airplane” book, rather than a “lying in bed after the kids are asleep for some serious reading” book.
***
In terms of the storytelling structure, Walker arranges his chapters by chronology and by incident. That is, events unfold along a recognizable timeline, but most of the chapters are devoted to the exploits of a single spy, so that there is a bit of back-and-forth.
As Walker explains at the outset, the “illegals” program was the child of necessity. In the early years following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, many Western nations refused to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s existence. With no embassies, the Soviets inserted agents into the stream of White Russian refugees fleeing their former country. Initially, the effort was rather ad hoc, with agents flying by the seat of their often-unzipped pants, using seduction and flamboyant backstories to trick their marks.
Over time, the program got a bit more professional, and gained a lot more oversight. Put more bluntly, the first wave of “illegals” often found themselves jailed or executed during Stalin’s purges. As Walker starkly notes, perhaps the most successful of the illegals was beaten and tortured for his success. Later illegals were ideologically sounder, but far less efficacious. For example, Rudolf Abel – famously portrayed in Bridge of Spies – really didn’t do all that much to advance the cause of Communism.
***
Perhaps inevitably, The Illegals is a tad inconsistent. Some chapters have great tales within; others simply do not. My favorite sections had to do with the training, which was quite intense, expensive, and time-consuming, especially given the marginal returns. I also appreciated Walker’s handling of the current day, where Russian troll farms spend their waking hours stirring the pot on news comment sections, Facebook, and the toxic hellscape that used to be Twitter. Unlike the physical illegals, the virtual ones have improved quite a bit, going from fractured English and LiveJournal posts to credible – indeed, frighteningly credible – simulacra of hate-filled Americans.
On the downside, I never got quite as much as I wanted. It’s hard to tell if this is a function of a lack of evidence, or an editorial decision to keep things slim. On the one hand, Walker – who worked as a journalist in Moscow for a decade – notes that the Russian archives on this topic are closed, and likely will be forever. As a result, he had to rely heavily on interviews, which can be difficult to corroborate, and are sometimes short on the particulars. On the other hand, even well-documented events, such as the assassination of Leon Trotsky, or the capture of Rudolf Abel, are dealt with summarily.
Knowing just a little, with the bulk of the story still hidden, like the butt-end of an iceberg, is very frustrating. For instance, I was immensely intrigued by the children of the illegals, but Walker never really digs down into this emotional motherlode of parental betrayal.
***
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union generally won the espionage wars. Stealing the atomic bomb gets you that prize. Their meaningful victories, though, came from turned Westerners, either ideological dupes like Kim Philby or Klaus Fuchs, or crooked capitalists like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
Walker’s biggest hurdle – one that he does not quite clear – is that the “illegals” program was generally a failure. Despite the marvelousness of the conceit, it never paid off with any intelligence coups. To the contrary, most of the illegals were laughable failures, going to extraordinary efforts to gather worthless information. Unsurprisingly, many of them seemed more content to enjoy the Western decadence they allegedly despised than do any real work.
Though Walker cannot be blamed for reporting reality, the reality is that this is not nearly as engrossing as its make-believe cousin from cable television.
- Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
Tell me if you’ve heard this plotline before: Russian spies given the identities of dead Westerners and taught to speak flawless English are smuggled into the United States, where they raise families, run legitimate businesses, and conduct espionage activities on the side, all while awaiting activation as a sleeper cell should World War III ever break out.
If this sounds a lot like the television series The Americans, you’re absolutely right. Created by Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, The Americans – which ran for six seasons, and achieved very-good-to-near-great status – was loosely based on the real-life adventures of the Soviet Union’s “illegals” program. From week to week, the fictional Jennings family lived the middle-class dream – which included their two super-irritating kids – all while singlehandedly winning the Cold War.
Shaun Walker’s The Illegals tells the true story behind the program that inspired The Americans. Unfortunately, despite Walker’s best efforts, this is not nearly as entertaining as I expected it to be. In the end, while truth may often be stranger than fiction, it is not always as interesting.
***
Coverage-wise, The Illegals begins in the early 1900s, during the final decades of the Romanov’s imperial rule. It ends over a century later, with a newly-belligerent Russian Federation using a mutated form of “illegal” to bring about the downfall of America, one social media post at a time. This is a lot of ground to cover in roughly 350 pages, and while this has the virtue of a breakneck pace, it comes at the cost of depth.
As a matter of personal preference, I generally like more. More pages. More details. More context. I recognize, however, that this is not a universal view, and that some put greater emphasis on tautness, leanness, and taking the shortest line to the point. If I had to fit this into my own classification system, I’d say this is more of a “commuter train” or “airplane” book, rather than a “lying in bed after the kids are asleep for some serious reading” book.
***
In terms of the storytelling structure, Walker arranges his chapters by chronology and by incident. That is, events unfold along a recognizable timeline, but most of the chapters are devoted to the exploits of a single spy, so that there is a bit of back-and-forth.
As Walker explains at the outset, the “illegals” program was the child of necessity. In the early years following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, many Western nations refused to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s existence. With no embassies, the Soviets inserted agents into the stream of White Russian refugees fleeing their former country. Initially, the effort was rather ad hoc, with agents flying by the seat of their often-unzipped pants, using seduction and flamboyant backstories to trick their marks.
Over time, the program got a bit more professional, and gained a lot more oversight. Put more bluntly, the first wave of “illegals” often found themselves jailed or executed during Stalin’s purges. As Walker starkly notes, perhaps the most successful of the illegals was beaten and tortured for his success. Later illegals were ideologically sounder, but far less efficacious. For example, Rudolf Abel – famously portrayed in Bridge of Spies – really didn’t do all that much to advance the cause of Communism.
***
Perhaps inevitably, The Illegals is a tad inconsistent. Some chapters have great tales within; others simply do not. My favorite sections had to do with the training, which was quite intense, expensive, and time-consuming, especially given the marginal returns. I also appreciated Walker’s handling of the current day, where Russian troll farms spend their waking hours stirring the pot on news comment sections, Facebook, and the toxic hellscape that used to be Twitter. Unlike the physical illegals, the virtual ones have improved quite a bit, going from fractured English and LiveJournal posts to credible – indeed, frighteningly credible – simulacra of hate-filled Americans.
On the downside, I never got quite as much as I wanted. It’s hard to tell if this is a function of a lack of evidence, or an editorial decision to keep things slim. On the one hand, Walker – who worked as a journalist in Moscow for a decade – notes that the Russian archives on this topic are closed, and likely will be forever. As a result, he had to rely heavily on interviews, which can be difficult to corroborate, and are sometimes short on the particulars. On the other hand, even well-documented events, such as the assassination of Leon Trotsky, or the capture of Rudolf Abel, are dealt with summarily.
Knowing just a little, with the bulk of the story still hidden, like the butt-end of an iceberg, is very frustrating. For instance, I was immensely intrigued by the children of the illegals, but Walker never really digs down into this emotional motherlode of parental betrayal.
***
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union generally won the espionage wars. Stealing the atomic bomb gets you that prize. Their meaningful victories, though, came from turned Westerners, either ideological dupes like Kim Philby or Klaus Fuchs, or crooked capitalists like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
Walker’s biggest hurdle – one that he does not quite clear – is that the “illegals” program was generally a failure. Despite the marvelousness of the conceit, it never paid off with any intelligence coups. To the contrary, most of the illegals were laughable failures, going to extraordinary efforts to gather worthless information. Unsurprisingly, many of them seemed more content to enjoy the Western decadence they allegedly despised than do any real work.
Though Walker cannot be blamed for reporting reality, the reality is that this is not nearly as engrossing as its make-believe cousin from cable television.
October 14, 2025
Riveting history of how the Soviet Union -- and then Putin's Russia -- used "illegals," or spies pretending to be ordinary citizens of another country, to try and gain an intelligence edge before, during, and after the Cold War. (Think that wonderful FX TV series, "The Americans," that starred Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, and Noah Emmerich.) The book was research for me for my 2027 (or 2028) novel, but I devoured it.
May 6, 2025
For six seasons between 2013 and 2018, “The Americans,” an American spy drama television series aired on the FX channel. It depicted the Jennings family as a typical suburban American family. There were two teenagers and parents who happened to be KGB spies at the outset of the Reagan administration who try to come across as your average American family grouping. Their job was to spy on the United States during a period when the Cold War was escalating. This Kremlin strategy of embedding spies in the role of everyday citizens was not an aberration as since the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Moscow began deploying Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to fit into American society and posing as different characters. In our current heightened environment with Russian aggression in Ukraine, interference in American elections, and Vladimir Putin’s obsession with recreating the Soviet Empire it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that Russia has continued this strategy today.
In his latest book, THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST, Shaum Walker, an international correspondent for The Guardian brings the Russian strategy to life as he explores the KGB’s most secretive program. His excellent monograph conveys a thrilling spy drama culminating with Putin’s espionage achievements as the Kremlin continues to infiltrate pro-western countries worldwide. In the current international climate Walker’s study is an important one as we try to combat Putin’s autocracy, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s seeming infatuation with the Russian autocrat.
Walker begins his study by introducing the reader to Ann Foley and her husband Don Heathfield, and their two sons Tim and Alex, However, in reality they were Russian spies; Elena Vavilova and Andrei Berzukov who had lived as a couple in Cambridge, MA for years. They would be arrested by the FBI and deported back to Russia in 2010. Their vocation was part of “the Illegal” program.
Illegals were recruited by the KGB. They were ordinary Soviet citizens who were given years of training to mold them into westerners. During the Cold War, the illegals living in the west were told to lie low and wait. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB was disbanded. However, once Putin assumed power he began to restore Russian spy capabilities, including “the Illegals” and a fresh batch of operatives was trained. Walker correctly argues that flying illegals based in Moscow on short term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin abroad was standard policy. “A new army of ‘virtual illegals’ impersonated westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long term illegals seemed over, the concepts underpinning their work remained at the heart of Russian intelligence operations.” It is clear that at various points during the last century the era of illegals seemed to be over. However, each time Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program. Today, a network of SVR safe houses scattered around Moscow has produced a new generation of operatives undergoing preparation for deployment overseas. They spend their time honing the pronunciation of target languages, studying archives of foreign newspapers and magazines to absorb culture and social context, and memorizing details of their cover stories. Soon, this new generation of illegals will be deployed to live what appears to be mundane lives in various locations around the world, while secretly implementing Moscow’s agenda.
Walker lays out the early history of using illegals by discussing their use before the Russian Revolution to overthrow the Tsar, and once in power as a vehicle to be used against the west and for their own survival. The strategy is based on Konspiratsiya, defined as “subterfuge,” or “conspiracy,” – “a set of complex rules, a rigid behavioral tool, and a way of life, the overarching arm….was to keep party operatives undercover and undetected, and was used by many groups of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries.”
Walker does a credible job explaining the Bolshevik approach toward espionage especially when they did not have diplomatic recognition in the west which meant they had no embassies to hide spies. The result was to develop the illegal program further. The author describes the role of many incredible operatives and their impact on the course of history. Men like Meer Trislisser, a Bolshevik operative, and Dmitry Bystrolyotov, another Russian spy perhaps the most talented illegal in the history of the program, make for fascinating reading as they navigate their training, implement what they have learned as they integrate into other societies, how they recruited local nationals to spy for them, and how successful they were in acquiring intelligence.
The program was run through the Cheka’s ION office which was in charge of the illegal program. A case in point is how they flipped an English communications officer, Ernest Oldham, into providing documents which covered much of the secret European diplomacy, i.e., impact of the depression, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, etc. It is clear that the Soviets were far ahead of the British and Americans when it came to espionage, especially when Franklin Roosevelt granted the Soviet Union formal recognition which provided them with an embassy in Washington to run their agents. Since the American economic influence was worldwide spies were needed to ferret out US positions. In addition, the Kremlin needed to industrialize quickly, and American technological and scientific secrets were a major target led by the fascinating figure of Ishak Akmerov who would train Americans like Michael Straight and Laurence Duggan, both with strong ties to the US State Department.
Walker’s insights into the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s purges and “show trials” of the 1930s, and the awkwardness created by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 reflect the role played by a series of illegals who were trained assassins and acquired the ability to hunt down anyone whom Stalin deemed a threat. Stalin’s purges would decimate the military leadership and foreign intelligence sources, but information still flowed from England from the “Cambridge 5,” who were a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold war and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. The five were convinced that the Marxism-Leninism of Soviet communism was the best available political system and the best defense against fascism. All pursued successful careers in branches of the British government. They passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviets, so much so that the KGB became suspicious that at least some of it was false. Perhaps as important as the specific state secrets was the demoralizing effect to the British establishment of their slow unmasking and the mistrust in British security this caused in the United States. In addition, Soviet agents like Richard Sorge became friends with Eugen Ott, the Nazi ambassador to Japan who along with others provided Stalin with evidence of the impending German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin and NKVD head, Lavrenti Beria rejected this intelligence as scaremongering as it went against Russian official policy. In June 1941, the Kremlin would pay for their stubborn adherence to the strict laws of Marxism-Leninism and Stalin’s perceptions of Hitler who he believed would have to defeat England before he could invade Russia.
About a quarter the way into the book, Walker turns to the Cold War and successfully argues that Stalin’s ability to negotiate a favorable postwar settlement was assisted by the work of the Cambridge 5 in England as they produced innumerable numbers of documents and intelligence. Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean, and Kim Philby, all members of the Cambridge 5 were essential figures and Philby himself was put in charge of British counterespionage! In fact, Walker argues that Stalin knew about the atomic bomb much earlier than Harry Truman which is why at the Potsdam Conference he did not act surprised when the president warned him about the new weapons.
Walker goes into detail concerning Stalin’s fears of Josef Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia who believed in a neutral approach to the Cold War and its path toward implementing socialism. Tito was able to act in this manner because his forces liberated his country from the Nazis, which was not the case throughout eastern Europe. Stalin tasked Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet illegal to assassinate Tito. Interestingly, earlier Grigulevich was also involved in a failed attempt to kill Leon Trotsky. Stalin would fail to kill Tito, who would remain a thorn in his side and Russia in general. The dispute with Tito would last until Stalin died in March 1953 which also saved thousands of others he implicated in the Doctor’s Plot, a conspiracy that Jews were out to kill the Russian dictator.
Many of Walker’s chapters are like a movie script for an espionage thriller. Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters deals with a Soviet agent’s ability to gain connections in the Vatican and manage to become the Costa Rican ambassador to the Vatican at a time when there was a fear in the west of a communist victory in Italy. Other fascinating chapters include the life and work of Yuri Linov, a young man who was very facile with foreign languages and began his KGB career informing on fellow students while studying at the university. By 1961 he would be trained as an illegal and deployed to the United States. Linov was very patriotic, seeing Soviet success in space with the mission of Yuri Gagarin as proof of Russian exceptionalism. Walker describes his recruitment, training, and missions in detail providing the reader with further insight into the illegal program. First, Linov would find himself in Prague during the summer of 1968 ordered to infiltrate the liberal reform movement under the government of Alexander Dubcek, and by 1970 his training and focus shifted to the Middle East as his handlers steered him to becoming the KGB’s expert on Zionism. Apart from Linov’s espionage work, Walker delves into personal aspects of an “illegal” life. He examines how his wife Tamara was chosen for him, and the difficulties their careers presented for them on a personal level. At a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to choose, train, and deploy illegals, Linov’s work seemed to be a success.
Walker also presents the American attempt to implement its own illegal program, and concluded it was almost impossible to train operatives in the intricacies of Soviet life and equip them with a story and documents that would stand up to Soviet security. The KGB on the other hand remained doggedly committed to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort. The question is why? According to the author a number of reasons emerge. First, the institutional memory of success from the early Soviet period and its roots in Bolshevik idealism kept the KGB wedded to illegal work as a key part of their own internal mythology. Second, under the leadership of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev who was in such poor health as being functionally useless as a leader that massive change could not take place. Third, by the late 1970s few of Russia’s 290 million people were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Those who were allowed to leave experienced a lack of free movement because of surveillance. As result, the only people who had some freedom in other countries were the illegals and they became the only reliable source of intelligence for Soviet leadership.
Once Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-1982) he would employ illegals as he saw fit. Having witnessed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 as ambassador to Hungary he would use all tools at hand to block any threat to Soviet control. Prague has already been mentioned, and Andropov had no qualms about employing illegals in Afghanistan in 1978 and assisting in a coup against the regime in Kabul that would lead to the Soviet version of “Vietnam” as it would be stuck in the Afghan quagmire that ultimately led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Toward the end of the narrative Walker reintegrates the lives of Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield into the monograph. He uses them as background to the emergence of Vladimir Putin as Soviet Premier and President. Interestingly, the two were dispatched to the United States during Gorbachev’s “glasnost” period as the KGB remained paranoid of the United States. Walker explains the meteoric rise of Putin and the restoration of the “KGB” mindset in Russia under a new organization, the SVR. Putin would rekindle the illegal program as part of a process to restore Russia to great power status which continues to this day. For a complete examination of Putin’s rise and career the two best biographies are Steven Lee Myers’ THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN and Philip Short’s recent work, PUTIN.
Under Putin, Foley and Putin would continue their espionage work and lives replicating an American couple until the FBI got wind of their work and arrested them. It is fair to conclude as does Joseph Finder in his New York Times, April 17, 2025, book review that “despite periods of diplomatic warming, Putin has never abandoned his illegals. He ordered the program revitalized in 2004, three years before his Munich speech signaled the return of Cold War tensions. While America was busy declaring the “end of history,” Russia was quietly training a new generation of agents to live among us.
Walker’s book serves as a reminder that somewhere in Russia right now, ordinary citizens are being molded into simulacrum Americans, learning to enjoy Starbucks and complain about property taxes, prepared to live among us regardless of who occupies the White House or how many summit handshakes take place. In international relations, as in life, it’s the quiet ones you need to watch.”
In his latest book, THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST, Shaum Walker, an international correspondent for The Guardian brings the Russian strategy to life as he explores the KGB’s most secretive program. His excellent monograph conveys a thrilling spy drama culminating with Putin’s espionage achievements as the Kremlin continues to infiltrate pro-western countries worldwide. In the current international climate Walker’s study is an important one as we try to combat Putin’s autocracy, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s seeming infatuation with the Russian autocrat.
Walker begins his study by introducing the reader to Ann Foley and her husband Don Heathfield, and their two sons Tim and Alex, However, in reality they were Russian spies; Elena Vavilova and Andrei Berzukov who had lived as a couple in Cambridge, MA for years. They would be arrested by the FBI and deported back to Russia in 2010. Their vocation was part of “the Illegal” program.
Illegals were recruited by the KGB. They were ordinary Soviet citizens who were given years of training to mold them into westerners. During the Cold War, the illegals living in the west were told to lie low and wait. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB was disbanded. However, once Putin assumed power he began to restore Russian spy capabilities, including “the Illegals” and a fresh batch of operatives was trained. Walker correctly argues that flying illegals based in Moscow on short term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin abroad was standard policy. “A new army of ‘virtual illegals’ impersonated westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long term illegals seemed over, the concepts underpinning their work remained at the heart of Russian intelligence operations.” It is clear that at various points during the last century the era of illegals seemed to be over. However, each time Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program. Today, a network of SVR safe houses scattered around Moscow has produced a new generation of operatives undergoing preparation for deployment overseas. They spend their time honing the pronunciation of target languages, studying archives of foreign newspapers and magazines to absorb culture and social context, and memorizing details of their cover stories. Soon, this new generation of illegals will be deployed to live what appears to be mundane lives in various locations around the world, while secretly implementing Moscow’s agenda.
Walker lays out the early history of using illegals by discussing their use before the Russian Revolution to overthrow the Tsar, and once in power as a vehicle to be used against the west and for their own survival. The strategy is based on Konspiratsiya, defined as “subterfuge,” or “conspiracy,” – “a set of complex rules, a rigid behavioral tool, and a way of life, the overarching arm….was to keep party operatives undercover and undetected, and was used by many groups of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries.”
Walker does a credible job explaining the Bolshevik approach toward espionage especially when they did not have diplomatic recognition in the west which meant they had no embassies to hide spies. The result was to develop the illegal program further. The author describes the role of many incredible operatives and their impact on the course of history. Men like Meer Trislisser, a Bolshevik operative, and Dmitry Bystrolyotov, another Russian spy perhaps the most talented illegal in the history of the program, make for fascinating reading as they navigate their training, implement what they have learned as they integrate into other societies, how they recruited local nationals to spy for them, and how successful they were in acquiring intelligence.
The program was run through the Cheka’s ION office which was in charge of the illegal program. A case in point is how they flipped an English communications officer, Ernest Oldham, into providing documents which covered much of the secret European diplomacy, i.e., impact of the depression, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, etc. It is clear that the Soviets were far ahead of the British and Americans when it came to espionage, especially when Franklin Roosevelt granted the Soviet Union formal recognition which provided them with an embassy in Washington to run their agents. Since the American economic influence was worldwide spies were needed to ferret out US positions. In addition, the Kremlin needed to industrialize quickly, and American technological and scientific secrets were a major target led by the fascinating figure of Ishak Akmerov who would train Americans like Michael Straight and Laurence Duggan, both with strong ties to the US State Department.
Walker’s insights into the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s purges and “show trials” of the 1930s, and the awkwardness created by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 reflect the role played by a series of illegals who were trained assassins and acquired the ability to hunt down anyone whom Stalin deemed a threat. Stalin’s purges would decimate the military leadership and foreign intelligence sources, but information still flowed from England from the “Cambridge 5,” who were a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold war and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. The five were convinced that the Marxism-Leninism of Soviet communism was the best available political system and the best defense against fascism. All pursued successful careers in branches of the British government. They passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviets, so much so that the KGB became suspicious that at least some of it was false. Perhaps as important as the specific state secrets was the demoralizing effect to the British establishment of their slow unmasking and the mistrust in British security this caused in the United States. In addition, Soviet agents like Richard Sorge became friends with Eugen Ott, the Nazi ambassador to Japan who along with others provided Stalin with evidence of the impending German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin and NKVD head, Lavrenti Beria rejected this intelligence as scaremongering as it went against Russian official policy. In June 1941, the Kremlin would pay for their stubborn adherence to the strict laws of Marxism-Leninism and Stalin’s perceptions of Hitler who he believed would have to defeat England before he could invade Russia.
About a quarter the way into the book, Walker turns to the Cold War and successfully argues that Stalin’s ability to negotiate a favorable postwar settlement was assisted by the work of the Cambridge 5 in England as they produced innumerable numbers of documents and intelligence. Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean, and Kim Philby, all members of the Cambridge 5 were essential figures and Philby himself was put in charge of British counterespionage! In fact, Walker argues that Stalin knew about the atomic bomb much earlier than Harry Truman which is why at the Potsdam Conference he did not act surprised when the president warned him about the new weapons.
Walker goes into detail concerning Stalin’s fears of Josef Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia who believed in a neutral approach to the Cold War and its path toward implementing socialism. Tito was able to act in this manner because his forces liberated his country from the Nazis, which was not the case throughout eastern Europe. Stalin tasked Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet illegal to assassinate Tito. Interestingly, earlier Grigulevich was also involved in a failed attempt to kill Leon Trotsky. Stalin would fail to kill Tito, who would remain a thorn in his side and Russia in general. The dispute with Tito would last until Stalin died in March 1953 which also saved thousands of others he implicated in the Doctor’s Plot, a conspiracy that Jews were out to kill the Russian dictator.
Many of Walker’s chapters are like a movie script for an espionage thriller. Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters deals with a Soviet agent’s ability to gain connections in the Vatican and manage to become the Costa Rican ambassador to the Vatican at a time when there was a fear in the west of a communist victory in Italy. Other fascinating chapters include the life and work of Yuri Linov, a young man who was very facile with foreign languages and began his KGB career informing on fellow students while studying at the university. By 1961 he would be trained as an illegal and deployed to the United States. Linov was very patriotic, seeing Soviet success in space with the mission of Yuri Gagarin as proof of Russian exceptionalism. Walker describes his recruitment, training, and missions in detail providing the reader with further insight into the illegal program. First, Linov would find himself in Prague during the summer of 1968 ordered to infiltrate the liberal reform movement under the government of Alexander Dubcek, and by 1970 his training and focus shifted to the Middle East as his handlers steered him to becoming the KGB’s expert on Zionism. Apart from Linov’s espionage work, Walker delves into personal aspects of an “illegal” life. He examines how his wife Tamara was chosen for him, and the difficulties their careers presented for them on a personal level. At a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to choose, train, and deploy illegals, Linov’s work seemed to be a success.
Walker also presents the American attempt to implement its own illegal program, and concluded it was almost impossible to train operatives in the intricacies of Soviet life and equip them with a story and documents that would stand up to Soviet security. The KGB on the other hand remained doggedly committed to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort. The question is why? According to the author a number of reasons emerge. First, the institutional memory of success from the early Soviet period and its roots in Bolshevik idealism kept the KGB wedded to illegal work as a key part of their own internal mythology. Second, under the leadership of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev who was in such poor health as being functionally useless as a leader that massive change could not take place. Third, by the late 1970s few of Russia’s 290 million people were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Those who were allowed to leave experienced a lack of free movement because of surveillance. As result, the only people who had some freedom in other countries were the illegals and they became the only reliable source of intelligence for Soviet leadership.
Once Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-1982) he would employ illegals as he saw fit. Having witnessed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 as ambassador to Hungary he would use all tools at hand to block any threat to Soviet control. Prague has already been mentioned, and Andropov had no qualms about employing illegals in Afghanistan in 1978 and assisting in a coup against the regime in Kabul that would lead to the Soviet version of “Vietnam” as it would be stuck in the Afghan quagmire that ultimately led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Toward the end of the narrative Walker reintegrates the lives of Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield into the monograph. He uses them as background to the emergence of Vladimir Putin as Soviet Premier and President. Interestingly, the two were dispatched to the United States during Gorbachev’s “glasnost” period as the KGB remained paranoid of the United States. Walker explains the meteoric rise of Putin and the restoration of the “KGB” mindset in Russia under a new organization, the SVR. Putin would rekindle the illegal program as part of a process to restore Russia to great power status which continues to this day. For a complete examination of Putin’s rise and career the two best biographies are Steven Lee Myers’ THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN and Philip Short’s recent work, PUTIN.
Under Putin, Foley and Putin would continue their espionage work and lives replicating an American couple until the FBI got wind of their work and arrested them. It is fair to conclude as does Joseph Finder in his New York Times, April 17, 2025, book review that “despite periods of diplomatic warming, Putin has never abandoned his illegals. He ordered the program revitalized in 2004, three years before his Munich speech signaled the return of Cold War tensions. While America was busy declaring the “end of history,” Russia was quietly training a new generation of agents to live among us.
Walker’s book serves as a reminder that somewhere in Russia right now, ordinary citizens are being molded into simulacrum Americans, learning to enjoy Starbucks and complain about property taxes, prepared to live among us regardless of who occupies the White House or how many summit handshakes take place. In international relations, as in life, it’s the quiet ones you need to watch.”
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June 29, 2025Truly fascinating~ I was hooked and glued to the book
April 16, 2025
Smart and engaging, goes all the way back to the beginning of the Soviet union—the connections with these processes over time (and the govt's persistent belief in them despite a lack of results is really interesting). Didn't change my life but as someone interested in the history of espionage, esp in the Cold War, this was definitely interesting and will be to others interested in those topics
November 5, 2025
"The illegals saw and heard things that no other Soviet citizen, even those in the elites, could dream of experiencing. It is no wonder that their analysis of the West was so prized by the KGB hierarchy, even if it was often little more than the musings of a delivery boy."
I have always been fascinated by spies, specially after the arrest of almost a dozen Russian spies in America, where they lived "normal" lives hiding their true identities from everyone including their kids. These spies were part of a program started by the Soviet Union almost a hundred years ago, and still exists today.
This is a fascinating book, it reads like a good spy thriller but it is the real life history of Russia's deepest cover spies in the West. Fast paced, well written, and deeply researched I recommend the book to anyone who loves reading about spies and history. There is a section of KGB Terminology and Structure and Key Terms at the end of the book that is very helpful, as well as extensive Notes and some great photographs.
I have always been fascinated by spies, specially after the arrest of almost a dozen Russian spies in America, where they lived "normal" lives hiding their true identities from everyone including their kids. These spies were part of a program started by the Soviet Union almost a hundred years ago, and still exists today.
This is a fascinating book, it reads like a good spy thriller but it is the real life history of Russia's deepest cover spies in the West. Fast paced, well written, and deeply researched I recommend the book to anyone who loves reading about spies and history. There is a section of KGB Terminology and Structure and Key Terms at the end of the book that is very helpful, as well as extensive Notes and some great photographs.
December 7, 2025
Tę książkę czyta się jak najlepszą powieść sensacyjną. Fascynująca lektura.
April 15, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and Profile Books Audio for the Audio ARC!
The Illegals is a fascinating look into the decades-long (and ongoing) program of Russian spies infiltrating Western nations, with the aim of getting into positions of power and influence and sending everything they learn back to the Russian government. The historical and modern-day examples that are detailed are intriguing and fascinating, and read like something out of a spy novel. Definitely worth reading if you are a fan of true crime, espionage, and the history of East-West relations.
The Illegals is a fascinating look into the decades-long (and ongoing) program of Russian spies infiltrating Western nations, with the aim of getting into positions of power and influence and sending everything they learn back to the Russian government. The historical and modern-day examples that are detailed are intriguing and fascinating, and read like something out of a spy novel. Definitely worth reading if you are a fan of true crime, espionage, and the history of East-West relations.
June 9, 2025
Meticulously-researched (more on this later) and engaging dive into the history of the Russian, then Soviet, and then Russian program of inserting agents into foreign (not just Western) countries ('illegals,' not following the written and unwritten rules usually associated with those operating with diplomatic cover). Walker provides excellent stories of a number of participants in the program, some well known, some not so much. A fascinating and compelling read.
A lot can be said for getting one's hands dirty by plumbing Soviet and Russian declassified archives to get the real story, but there's something also to be said for taking them with a grain of salt. These same archives are often filled with half-truths and outright fabrications to protect and/or promote those providing oversight or otherwise simply advance a specific notion to superiors, with the material often winding up in the hands of state leadership.
A book well worth your time.
A lot can be said for getting one's hands dirty by plumbing Soviet and Russian declassified archives to get the real story, but there's something also to be said for taking them with a grain of salt. These same archives are often filled with half-truths and outright fabrications to protect and/or promote those providing oversight or otherwise simply advance a specific notion to superiors, with the material often winding up in the hands of state leadership.
A book well worth your time.
August 15, 2025
Anyone else remember The Americans, that show about two KGB spies posing as a normal American family in the Cold War era while their kids remained completely oblivious? This is the less cinematic but no less fascinating truth. Russia has remained committed over the decades to doing the Absolute Most when it comes to espionage--not necessarily the most effective, but definitely the most work. It’s like someone who insists on scrubbing their entire floor by hand with a toothbrush rather than mopping, or trying to brute-force a combination instead of just drilling through the safe. The dedication is impressive but confusing. It’s a very Russian blend of audacity and inflexibility.
The Illegals was accessible, thorough, and timely (we get a little bit at the end about Russia’s more recent ventures into online influencing). Highly recommend.
(I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway.)
The Illegals was accessible, thorough, and timely (we get a little bit at the end about Russia’s more recent ventures into online influencing). Highly recommend.
(I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway.)
September 30, 2025
It’s a book that reads like a collection of spy stories all interrelated. A very well researched book on espionage and the extent of Russian tentacles that have spread across .
While the book focuses on western world i am sure it would be same for Asia and other countries. It is the biggest spy operation and still running. Russians in India especially Goa now seem all part of this ring .
The scale and ambition of the project and that’s it’s been running now over a hundred years is mind boggling . No matter who takes power in russia the system Carries on . It’s also gives the reader an inside perspective on leadership of Russia and changes that came with it.
It is a must read .
While the book focuses on western world i am sure it would be same for Asia and other countries. It is the biggest spy operation and still running. Russians in India especially Goa now seem all part of this ring .
The scale and ambition of the project and that’s it’s been running now over a hundred years is mind boggling . No matter who takes power in russia the system Carries on . It’s also gives the reader an inside perspective on leadership of Russia and changes that came with it.
It is a must read .
October 9, 2025
Nie do uwierzenia, że to nie jakiś films szpiegowski, tylko rzeczywistość. Jak mawia klasyk strach się bać na jak wysokich stołkach w polsce siedzą rosyjscy szpiedzy
August 18, 2025
Entertaining as hell
December 1, 2025
Interesting read, but lengthy. It is amazing how long the illegals program survived/survives (?) because of the impact living a double life had on so many of them - especially the two (and their family) with which the book started.
April 24, 2025
Rather interesting. Makes you wonder.
June 15, 2025
I thought it was going to get bogged down in minutiae or muddled with all kinds of geopolitical dimensions, but the examples are told as stories, making them easier to digest and connect with. Very fascinating to consider why the Soviet Union/Russia is unique in its need for/use of illegal spies along with the efficacy (potential and lack of). It tells a bigger story power shifts in Russia since the fall of the Czars and of those big muddled geopolitical affairs without being pedantic or painful.
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June 4, 2025In the summer of 1992 a senior British army officer was given the chance to visit Russia and Kyrgyzstan. His trip would have been unthinkable for most of the century then approaching its end. Now he saw up close the soldiers that until recently his forces had been ranged against on opposite sides of the Cold War. He wrote to another senior officer that it was ‘a mystery we believed the USSR to be a superpower’.
Reading some of the stories in The Illegals, you experience a similar surprise. Agents are sent abroad to live undercover and further the cause of international Marxism-Leninism. Sometimes, they end up doing remarkably little. Take Albrecht Dittrich, who gave up a promising academic career in chemistry to serve the Soviet state. His first nine months were spent working as a bicycle courier. Alongside those tales of dull routine, there are of course some big successes. Stalin knew about the US having an atomic bomb before the secret was shared with Harry Truman, who was only told after he was sworn into office.
Shaun Walker has uncovered some characters who led lives that would be dismissed in fiction as too far-fetched. Perhaps the most astonishing career is that of Dmitry Bystrolyotov (a surname that, as Walker points out, means ‘fast flier’). In the early years of Soviet power, Bystrolyotov travelled Europe masquerading as a cloth trader, a Hungarian aristocrat fallen on hard times, and a banker. This was after his pre-secret agent stints as a seafarer, gravedigger, and law student. He cultivated a disaffected alcoholic in Britain’s foreign office. Such a source was especially valuable in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations with few countries, and, in consequence, few embassies available as bases for ‘legal’ espionage.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
James Rodgers’ latest book is Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow.
Reading some of the stories in The Illegals, you experience a similar surprise. Agents are sent abroad to live undercover and further the cause of international Marxism-Leninism. Sometimes, they end up doing remarkably little. Take Albrecht Dittrich, who gave up a promising academic career in chemistry to serve the Soviet state. His first nine months were spent working as a bicycle courier. Alongside those tales of dull routine, there are of course some big successes. Stalin knew about the US having an atomic bomb before the secret was shared with Harry Truman, who was only told after he was sworn into office.
Shaun Walker has uncovered some characters who led lives that would be dismissed in fiction as too far-fetched. Perhaps the most astonishing career is that of Dmitry Bystrolyotov (a surname that, as Walker points out, means ‘fast flier’). In the early years of Soviet power, Bystrolyotov travelled Europe masquerading as a cloth trader, a Hungarian aristocrat fallen on hard times, and a banker. This was after his pre-secret agent stints as a seafarer, gravedigger, and law student. He cultivated a disaffected alcoholic in Britain’s foreign office. Such a source was especially valuable in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations with few countries, and, in consequence, few embassies available as bases for ‘legal’ espionage.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
James Rodgers’ latest book is Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow.
May 17, 2025
Most nations excel in a particular product or service. The Soviet Union has always excelled in training spies to collect information in a quest to vanquish their enemies. The Russian republic continues to be engaged in this activity.
Normally, national embassies employ scores of employees pretending to carry out their official duties while surreptitiously searching for a host nation's top secrets. There are drawbacks to this activity. Everyone expects an embassy to be full of spies. They are usually closely monitored, limiting their opportunity to operate freely. Illegals are engaged in a different game.
Certain individuals, usually Russian citizens, devoted to the motherland and its ideology, have been willing to spend years of their lives living in a foreign country, pretending to be citizens in order to collect useful information. It's a messy, unsavory, destructive business. After years of training, Illegals are acting in a drama that never ends. They can never utter a word in their native language. Illegals sometimes have children whose care is meant to be subordinated to the orders of the state. Couples have had to abandon their children to relatives when false identities were threatened. It was standard procedure that associates and neighbors in the host country were told that the child had died in an accident.
The training regimen for illegals is time consuming, expensive. Failures are many. Rewards are slight. In the digital age it is so much easier to gather information. Illegals have been relegated to a mythical, heroic status in Russian culture. Let's hope they are a thing of the past.
Normally, national embassies employ scores of employees pretending to carry out their official duties while surreptitiously searching for a host nation's top secrets. There are drawbacks to this activity. Everyone expects an embassy to be full of spies. They are usually closely monitored, limiting their opportunity to operate freely. Illegals are engaged in a different game.
Certain individuals, usually Russian citizens, devoted to the motherland and its ideology, have been willing to spend years of their lives living in a foreign country, pretending to be citizens in order to collect useful information. It's a messy, unsavory, destructive business. After years of training, Illegals are acting in a drama that never ends. They can never utter a word in their native language. Illegals sometimes have children whose care is meant to be subordinated to the orders of the state. Couples have had to abandon their children to relatives when false identities were threatened. It was standard procedure that associates and neighbors in the host country were told that the child had died in an accident.
The training regimen for illegals is time consuming, expensive. Failures are many. Rewards are slight. In the digital age it is so much easier to gather information. Illegals have been relegated to a mythical, heroic status in Russian culture. Let's hope they are a thing of the past.
May 18, 2025
This was fascinating. It was compelling to read, finding the right balance for me between being informative and well researched, and entertaining for a general audience. I liked the focus on key 'illegals' throughout the 100 years of the department, as it helped to humanise the participants instead of holding them at arms length. Some of the missions were really audacious, such as the plot to kill Trotsky and the unsuccessful bid to kill Tito, but for the most part, a lot of the work seemed fairly mundane for the high level of risk. Overall, I enjoyed this an awful lot and it has really piqued my interest in the history of the Soviet Union as a whole.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.
December 9, 2025
A barnstorming read that is testament to the value of great research, Walker dives into the history of Russia’s “illegals” program and has struck an almost perfect balance between informing the reader and finding the story.
The author is especially great when it comes to diving deep into the individual lives of the operatives themselves, but also the changing context within which they were working, from the heady idealistic early days after the Russian Civil War, to Stalin’s purges, the Cold War and through to the recent boom in troll factories under Putin.
We travel from the corridors of the Lubyanka in Moscow to Prague during the uprising against Soviet rule, to New York and Rome, to fighting the Afghans at the start of the war in 1979 and to Kiev at the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There are mass poisonings at the dinner table, seductions, abandoned families and attempted assassinations. (Tito, the disloyal Yugoslav dictator, wrote an angry letter to Moscow in 1949: “Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one with a bomb and another with a rifle … If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow.”).
Most of the Illegals would change roles during their career, along the lines of Austrian car mechanic to Czech intellectual, for example, and Walker also delves into the mental stress and family collapses these people faced leading double or even triple lives, whilst most of the time being of little to no use at all to their handlers in Moscow.
Walker finishes with a warning about how modern technology and our inter-connectedness provide risks on a scale not seen before. Discussing elections in the US, I quote: “Facebook estimated that 120 fake Russia-backed pages wrote eighty thousand posts during and after the election, which were directly seen by 29 million Americans and reached as many as 126 million people when reposts and shares were counted. It is impossible to know how many of those 126 million might have been swing voters. But the fact that a Russian influence operation could stealthily reach millions of Americans, and secretly arrange protests on domestic issues without any outward sign of Russian participation, was remarkable. It had taken the KGB years to create fake identities like Don Heathfield and Ann Foley for its illegals. Matt Skiber (an imaginary character used to create pro-Trump rallies) could be brought to life with a few clicks of a mouse. And if anyone became suspicious of Skiber, he could be deleted as quickly as he had been created. A new virtual identity could take his place.”
My only tiny criticism is that the book could have been 50 pages shorter - perhaps one too many of the Illegals was documented, but that is me being pernickety in my desire to see this book achieve absolute perfection. On every other front, if ‘a spy is an actor, but an actor that doesn’t need a public or a stage,’ Walker has done an amazing job in giving us a chance to peek behind the curtains, and what a scene he has painted.
The author is especially great when it comes to diving deep into the individual lives of the operatives themselves, but also the changing context within which they were working, from the heady idealistic early days after the Russian Civil War, to Stalin’s purges, the Cold War and through to the recent boom in troll factories under Putin.
We travel from the corridors of the Lubyanka in Moscow to Prague during the uprising against Soviet rule, to New York and Rome, to fighting the Afghans at the start of the war in 1979 and to Kiev at the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There are mass poisonings at the dinner table, seductions, abandoned families and attempted assassinations. (Tito, the disloyal Yugoslav dictator, wrote an angry letter to Moscow in 1949: “Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one with a bomb and another with a rifle … If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow.”).
Most of the Illegals would change roles during their career, along the lines of Austrian car mechanic to Czech intellectual, for example, and Walker also delves into the mental stress and family collapses these people faced leading double or even triple lives, whilst most of the time being of little to no use at all to their handlers in Moscow.
Walker finishes with a warning about how modern technology and our inter-connectedness provide risks on a scale not seen before. Discussing elections in the US, I quote: “Facebook estimated that 120 fake Russia-backed pages wrote eighty thousand posts during and after the election, which were directly seen by 29 million Americans and reached as many as 126 million people when reposts and shares were counted. It is impossible to know how many of those 126 million might have been swing voters. But the fact that a Russian influence operation could stealthily reach millions of Americans, and secretly arrange protests on domestic issues without any outward sign of Russian participation, was remarkable. It had taken the KGB years to create fake identities like Don Heathfield and Ann Foley for its illegals. Matt Skiber (an imaginary character used to create pro-Trump rallies) could be brought to life with a few clicks of a mouse. And if anyone became suspicious of Skiber, he could be deleted as quickly as he had been created. A new virtual identity could take his place.”
My only tiny criticism is that the book could have been 50 pages shorter - perhaps one too many of the Illegals was documented, but that is me being pernickety in my desire to see this book achieve absolute perfection. On every other front, if ‘a spy is an actor, but an actor that doesn’t need a public or a stage,’ Walker has done an amazing job in giving us a chance to peek behind the curtains, and what a scene he has painted.
August 10, 2025
What a fascinating story! While long at some points and some confusing Russian names (many had the same or similar names), this book painted an in-depth and clear history of Russia’s illegal program. Its initial successes were fascinating, and the use of it during the Cold War is almost unbelievable. The amount of time, effort, and money devoted to this program is staggering for the little benefits it usually provided. The sleeper agents section was chilling as well, especially Andrei and Elena’s story. The afterword was very fitting and alarming as the war in Ukraine still rages on. A captivating and engrossing book about Russia! I would definitely recommend reading it!
September 29, 2025
This book is about dedicated Soviet spies, known as "illegals," who are situated in the United States as spies. They are dedicated to their country and willing to make enormous sacrifices in order to carry out their mission. Their spouses were often chosen for them by the Russian government, so that they could work together. Their children did not know what their parents did, but sometimes wondered why they had no relatives -- no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins -- as their friends did. To explain this, the illegals had to make up stories about how their relatives lived too far away to visit. In other words, they had to lie to their children all their lives. And that's if they were allowed to have children. Some of the illegals already were married and had a child, and were forced to leave the child with grandparents in Russia. In this way, they were like missionaries who go to Africa and leave their children behind. Is that noble of them, to make such sacrifices? Or horrible? I imagine that some of the children were damaged.
The TV series, "The Americans," was based on this book. I loved the series, and was interested in how Russians, who hadn't been speaking English from childhood, could pass for native Americans. You can study a foreign language and become fluent in it, but if someone hasn't been speaking the language from early childhood, they will inevitably have a trace of an accent that reveals that they are not native speakers. This book doesn't really address the question of how they were able to enable people born and raised in the Soviet Union to pass as native-born Americans. It does acknowledge that some of them had Russian accents, or were not completely fluent, using incorrect grammar, which incited some curiosity in the Americans they lived amid. But they were usually able to come up with an explanation for their speech. For example, one illegal said that he was from Philadelphia; he just had a Russian nanny as a child. That's not terribly plausible (how many Americans have Russian nannies?), but Americans tend to take people at their word and trust what they say about where they're from, what jobs they have, and why they speak the way they do. One of the funniest lines in the book comes from the granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, who taught an illegal at her college. She said about him, "The dude wasa so obviously Russian. His accent, his manner: it was like talking to Boris Yeltsin."
The beginning of the book gave me insights into Stalin. The middle part bogs down with too much detail about the spying programs. But the end is fascinating. It takes up the question, what was the advantage of having such an expensive and difficult to realize project of spies? In fact, most of the information gleaned by the spies was not terribly useful and, after the 20s and 30s, there were better ways of getting information.
Coming into the contemporary period, the book discusses Russian trolls on social media. Sometimes they were very clumsy and easily identifiable. But clearly Putin was able to recognize and utilize the divisions between Americans. It is difficult to determine the impact these troll-illegals have had on American politics and elections.
Another interesting topic has to do with the nature of Putin. He is former KGB and he loves spies. So even if this wasn't the most effective way of getting information, he was totally committed to it. We all know that Putin wants to reinstate the former Soviet Union, but he doesn't really want to be Stalin. He wants to be Peter the Great. He no longer sees the Great Conflict between Russia and the U.S. as a conflict between communism and capitalism. Both are kind of passé. Rather, he sees the U.S. as a dangerous enemy because it does not want Russia to be a superpower. He has been convinced several times that the U.S. was about to launch a nuclear attack on Russia. There's a fascinating parallel between Putin and Trump. Both of them promote a vision of their country's histories as mythology. "Schools focused on patriotic tuition, and it became a criminal offense to suggest similarities between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany." Another parallel is that both men and those in their inner circles begin to believe their own propaganda. In Putin's case, they actually believed that "Ukraine was dragged unwillingly away from Russia by the West. They were shocked when an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians stood defiantly against Russia's occupation." If Ukraine is forced to yield part of its territory to Russia, the likely parts will be Russian-speaking. But I wonder how many of them would actually want to become part of Russia.
The TV series, "The Americans," was based on this book. I loved the series, and was interested in how Russians, who hadn't been speaking English from childhood, could pass for native Americans. You can study a foreign language and become fluent in it, but if someone hasn't been speaking the language from early childhood, they will inevitably have a trace of an accent that reveals that they are not native speakers. This book doesn't really address the question of how they were able to enable people born and raised in the Soviet Union to pass as native-born Americans. It does acknowledge that some of them had Russian accents, or were not completely fluent, using incorrect grammar, which incited some curiosity in the Americans they lived amid. But they were usually able to come up with an explanation for their speech. For example, one illegal said that he was from Philadelphia; he just had a Russian nanny as a child. That's not terribly plausible (how many Americans have Russian nannies?), but Americans tend to take people at their word and trust what they say about where they're from, what jobs they have, and why they speak the way they do. One of the funniest lines in the book comes from the granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, who taught an illegal at her college. She said about him, "The dude wasa so obviously Russian. His accent, his manner: it was like talking to Boris Yeltsin."
The beginning of the book gave me insights into Stalin. The middle part bogs down with too much detail about the spying programs. But the end is fascinating. It takes up the question, what was the advantage of having such an expensive and difficult to realize project of spies? In fact, most of the information gleaned by the spies was not terribly useful and, after the 20s and 30s, there were better ways of getting information.
Coming into the contemporary period, the book discusses Russian trolls on social media. Sometimes they were very clumsy and easily identifiable. But clearly Putin was able to recognize and utilize the divisions between Americans. It is difficult to determine the impact these troll-illegals have had on American politics and elections.
Another interesting topic has to do with the nature of Putin. He is former KGB and he loves spies. So even if this wasn't the most effective way of getting information, he was totally committed to it. We all know that Putin wants to reinstate the former Soviet Union, but he doesn't really want to be Stalin. He wants to be Peter the Great. He no longer sees the Great Conflict between Russia and the U.S. as a conflict between communism and capitalism. Both are kind of passé. Rather, he sees the U.S. as a dangerous enemy because it does not want Russia to be a superpower. He has been convinced several times that the U.S. was about to launch a nuclear attack on Russia. There's a fascinating parallel between Putin and Trump. Both of them promote a vision of their country's histories as mythology. "Schools focused on patriotic tuition, and it became a criminal offense to suggest similarities between Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany." Another parallel is that both men and those in their inner circles begin to believe their own propaganda. In Putin's case, they actually believed that "Ukraine was dragged unwillingly away from Russia by the West. They were shocked when an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians stood defiantly against Russia's occupation." If Ukraine is forced to yield part of its territory to Russia, the likely parts will be Russian-speaking. But I wonder how many of them would actually want to become part of Russia.
August 7, 2025
Imagine being a Soviet spy living deep undercover with your family in suburban America; now the first time in 20 years hearing the Russian language and it’s coming from your television as your kid plays Call of Duty. Talk about jarring.
This book was fascinating. It had me questioning if my parents might be spies too
This book was fascinating. It had me questioning if my parents might be spies too
December 4, 2025
This book provides a very well-researched insight into the illegals program since its inception until the present day, with great detail. What is depicted equally well is the context and the philosophy for keeping the program alive despite its many shortcomings, the KGB mindset of paranoia permeating throughout all of these years.
June 22, 2025
Very good yet very depressing. Keeping track of the endless names was a challenge.
June 30, 2025
Delightful, educational, and sobering all at once. I particularly enjoyed the episode of a Soviet illegal acting as a Costa Rican diplomat in Italy.
July 19, 2025
Illegals doesn't quite live up to its title. Written by a journalist--a good one with deep area knowledge--it suffers from the same flaw that most books by journalists. It is a collection of individual stories about specific illegals. It is entertaining and well done. But, if you want to really understand Russian intelligence operations and their impact, I recommend Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin's The Mitrokhin Archive.
August 16, 2025
Fascinating and frightening
April 25, 2025
An absolutely brilliant book. incredible amount of reporting, well crafted and presented. informative, entertaining and just a great read.
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